I have had many long conversation with my parents about being in leadership roles in the schools. I have asked my dad several times questions like this:
- How did you create such a change and turn that school around?
- How do you get your teachers to "buy in" to the new policies and procedures?
- How did you come up with that idea!?
- What made you want to make that change?
- If something is not up to par, how do you fix it?
- How do you identify the sources of problems, and what process do you take to fix those specific problems in an effective and efficient manner?
I understand that school leadership is not an exact science, and I always thought that effective school principals were just really creative and had some sort of "power" that helped them achieve results when things were looking bad.
As I have begun to learn about action research, the answers to some of these questions are becoming much clearer.
Action Research involves an initial inquiry when a problem is put on the table. Through thorough investigation of data and research of literature on the topic at hand, it is much easier to start to "fix" on little problem at a time.
There is no magic power or extreme creativity that usually fixes problems on a campus. It is intentional inquiry, research, and implementation of research based strategies that improve most situations.
It is clear that your family is truly committed to the education of young people. What are some of the changes you have participated in that have positively affected your campus? I am currently a special ed teacher and have decided to focus on the implementation of inclusion within the master schedule at University HS in Waco. We have implemented inclusion in progressive stages over the course of the last five years and would like to evaluate the effectiveness of our past, current, and proposed future models based on hard evidence. Do you work at a campus where inclusion has changed progressively over the course of the last couple of years? It would be great to read your thoughts on inclusion and how it has evolved.
ReplyDeleteI like the last paragraph that you've included, "there is no magic power." Sometimes, we all wish that there would be. I would love to teach in a very ideal school. However, I think it's the challenges that we face that help us to become better educators and to have better schools.
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